-I'm now the proud owner of an 18dBi ex-Galaxy connifer antenna with chimney mounting bracket and mast. With the help of Ian and Jacinta it was a very easy task of hopping up on a nearby rooftop and taking it down. The owner of the house was extremely friendly about the whole operation. He had signed up for the "one month free" Galaxy TV offer years ago, and never continued with the subscription. He thought that being paid money for a useless antenna which didn't cost him anything in the first place was a great deal.

+Had a WL200 wireless card that was going to be turned into an AP. Unfortunately, it was damaged in our once-every-hundred-year storm, and now makes an excellent motherboard killer when plugged into a machine.

-My WL200 has arrived, although it's waiting for me to drop it into the machine which will later be hooked up to the Galaxy antenna. The Omni on [NodeFFB] is literally within a stone's throw, so I'm expecting to be able to see it without a big antenna. [NodeAIE] should be reachable once the galaxy is mounted.

+I've now got a cute little NetGear wireless router which I'm in the process of configuring. While I have an 18dB ex-Galaxy TV antenna, I haven't yet modified it and mounted on the roof. So at the moment, the footprint for the node is very small.

-I need to measure out the amount of cable I need for the galaxy and then convert it and wire everything up. Strangly enough I'm not eager to be crawling through the cramped roof cavity above the office to do the measurements and cabling.

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-Update: Have the WL200 card in my workstation. I can run it with host the hostap drivers (which won't let me set the channel), or the orinoco drivers (which won't let me change modes). It doesn't hang the machine or kill the regular NIC now -- a combination of using Linux 2.4.19 and shuffling PCI cards (ick).

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-The wireless tools package whines about how I'm not using the latest wireless extensions, and then promptly compiles themselves for even earlier extensions than what the kernel is using, and proceeds to have a big whinge about that. I suspect this may be some of my problems.

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-I suspect I'll need to play with it all some more before I can use kismet effectively. Right now it's useless because I either can't switch channels, or can't drop the card into receive-everything mode.

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-Update (September 2003): Still have all the gear, haven't set it up.

+It will be a little time before the node is accessible to those walking past for use, as the security implications need to be considered.